the m0vie blog

This July, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the sixth season of The X-Files and the third (and final) season of Millennium.

Field Trip works well as the penultimate episode of the sixth season.

It returns to a lot of big ideas threaded through the sixth season, particularly as they relate to endings and mortality. It also pushes the bond between Mulder and Scully to the fore; it feels like something of a spiritual successor to both Bad Blood and Folie á Deux in its portrayal of the dynamic between Mulder and Scully, charting a rough arc in how Mulder and Scully come to see themselves and each other. Even beyond all that, it contains another surrogate romantic relationship for Mulder and Scully, this time in Wallace and Angela Schiff.

More to the point, Field Trip seems to hit on the core anxieties at the heart of the sixth season. It is a meditation on the show’s success and the status quo that has to be so careful maintained to keep the show from tipping over. As with Triangle, Dreamland I, Dreamland II, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas and Monday, our heroes find themselves trapped in something of a weird alternate reality. The climax of Field Trip hinges on both Mulder and Scully deducing that their world operates according to the logic of a television show.

However, Field Trip is perhaps most intriguing in the way that it proposes two separate endings to The X-Files. The humongous fungus at the heart of Field Trip offers both Mulder and Scully a conclusion to their six-year journey, an opportunity for closure and satisfaction. In doing so, Field Trip suggests that it is the central tension at the heart of The X-Files that keeps the show young. There is no way to end the show without absolutely and definitively declaring that one of the characters is right and the other is wrong.

As such, the endings seem mutually exclusive. Field Trip suggests that endings designed to satisfy Mulder and Scully and mutually exclusive and irreconcilable – recalling the implication in Bad Blood that both Mulder and Scully filter the same events through different lenses. However, Field Trip is rather more optimistic in its assessment of the dynamic between Mulder and Scully. While it might not be able to provide an ending to the show that satisfies both, Field Trip suggests that the duo have reconciled themselves to each other.

Whereas Bad Blood seemed to state that Mulder and Scully would never share the same perspective, Field Trip suggests that both characters have evolved and matured to the point where they can see the world through the eyes of the other. Bad Blood featured the two characters positing wildly different accounts of the same event, but Field Trip only resolves when Mulder and Scully come to share each other’s perspective. It feels entirely appropriate to close out the sixth season suggesting a new harmony between the two leads.

A recurring theme in the sixth season is a sense of anxiety around the success of The X-Files, and what that means for the show itself. Quite a few scripts in the sixth season meditate on the idea of immortality or timelessness, presenting the status quo as a centre of gravity that will eventually pull the show back into a familiar shape. This logic even applied to the season’s big mythology two-parter, Two Fathers and One Son, which gestured to close the mythology without actually resolving anything.

Success is often a double-edged sword. The X-Files had begun its life as a scrappy cult hit and had grown into a massive franchise with feature films and merchandise and even the possibility of spin-offs. By the sixth season, it was miles from its cult roots. More than a thousand miles, in fact – the distance between Vancouver and Los Angeles. The X-Files was no longer something designed to fill a late-night slot on Friday nights, it was one of the biggest success stories for the Fox Network.

Although The X-Files was technically closer to the end of its run than the beginning, it seemed rather unlikely that Fox would ever let The X-Files go. The show had succeeded by just about any measure. It had reached the hundred episode mark, which was necessary for future syndication; it had lived beyond Chris Carter’s original target of five seasons; it had produced a feature film; it had managed to peak just outside the top ten shows on American television. To anybody looking at The X-Files, it seemed like the show was invincible.

While success is much better than the alternative, it does raise all manner of existential questions. Could The X-Files keep running in perpetuity? Was it ever going to be possible to end the show? Would it even be possible to change the show in a way that its core properties would not simply reassert themselves a few episodes later? Mulder and Scully were taken off the X-files in The End, but reassigned in One Son. The conspiracy against mankind had apparently been destroyed in One Son, but it would reappear in Biogenesis.

In watching the sixth season, Paul A. Cantor noted a recurring postmodern anxiety running through the sixth season. As he observed in Gilligan Unbound:

In a postmodern fashion, several X-Files episodes deal self-reflexively with television as a medium. The show has kept searching for ways to portray its own condition – what it is like to be trapped in a successful TV series, having to turn out one episode after another basically in the same mold. The best example of this kind of episode is Monday, in which Mulder and Scully get caught in a strange time loop – they are condemned to live over the same disastrous day endlessly. As we watch scenes being repeated with only minor variations, we begin to share the frustrations of the real actors in the series, doomed to a life of endless retakes. In two other sixth-season episodes, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas and Field Trip, Mulder and Scully must in effect wake up to the fact that they are really actors, playing parts that exist only on the level of fantasy.

This is to say nothing of the way that reality snaps back like a “rubber band” in Dreamland II or the decision to make Scully immortal in Tithonus.

This sense that Mulder and Scully are trapped in a television show is suggested repeatedly by the script to Field Trip, even before the two agents are captured by the gigantic man-eating fungus. Directly after the credits, Mulder is still getting used to the new office. “I don’t know what they did with the screen for this thing,” he complains. He could be referring to Spender and Fowley, but it is also a sly acknowledgement that this is not even the same basement set that had appeared in the first five seasons of the show. With the move to Los Angeles, it was redesigned.

In that same early sequence, Mulder and Scully argue about the narrative rules of The X-Files. Scully seems quite tired of the way that Mulder immediately jumps to the most outlandish explanation for what should be a fairly simple case. She wonders, “Mulder, can’t you just for once, just for the novelty of it, come up with the simplest explanation, the most logical one, instead of automatically jumping to UFOs or Bigfoot or…?” Scully doesn’t need to be stuck in a time warp like Monday to hear the same routine over and over and over.

Mulder, for his part, is rather genre savvy. He appeals to rules of The X-Files, where Occam’s Razor is at best a red herring. “Scully, in six years, how often have I been wrong?” he asks. “No, seriously. I mean, every time I bring you a case we go through this perfunctory dance. You tell me I’m not being scientifically rigorous and that I’m off my nut, and then in the end who turns out to be right like 98.9% of the time? I just think I’ve… earned the benefit of the doubt here.”

As with Scully’s half-hearted protest, there is a sense of fatigue here. That first scene between Mulder and Scully draws attention to just how familiar this set-up must be. Mulder and Scully have been having that argument for six whole years. That has to be incredibly irritating – for the characters, the actors, the writers. At the same time, it is also an essential ingredient of The X-Files. Although this might be Mulder’s first slideshow since Bad Blood, that “perfunctory dance” is one of the expected parts of the series.

Of course, Mulder is entirely correct according to the narrative logic of The X-Files. Scully’s scientific and rational position is perfectly justifiable and commendable in the real world, but it does not hold sway within a television about paranormal events. The great tragedy of Scully as a character is the fact that she is utterly unaware that she does not live in the real world. Scully is not self-aware enough to figure out that the world she inhabits does not adhere to the rules and principles that govern the real world.

However, this sense that Mulder and Scully are essentially trapped within an episode of The X-Files is only compounded once they are both captured by the carnivorous fungus creature. When Mulder and Scully begin to deduce the nature of what is happening, all the indicators are related to the medium themselves. Mulder and Scully seem to be realising that they are stuck in a hallucination, but the script frames the discover in such a way that it feels like they are becoming aware of their nature as television characters.

When Mulder visits his apartment, knocking on the door so as to attract Scully’s attention, Scully immediately points to the plot hole. “Mulder, why did you knock?” she wonders. “This is your apartment. And you don’t seem the least bit surprised to find me here.” Her worries only deepen once she realises something else. “Mulder, you don’t remember getting here, do you?” she asks. “Neither do I.” Of course neither Mulder nor Scully remember how they got there. The nature of television means that they travelled between cuts; not existing while off-screen.

During the fakeout, it is Mulder’s turn to point out the scripting contrivances that led them to this point. “Once you recognized that we were under a chemical influence then it simply kind of… broke its spell?” Mulder inquires. “Scully, how could we simply will ourselves out of a chemical hallucination?” It is admittedly a rather convenient plot development that doesn’t fit at all with the way the world works, but the episode then rather cheekily has Skinner pull both Mulder and Scully out of the ground, an ending just as contrived.

Mulder’s nitpicks go beyond some of the scripting choices. “Scully, how long were we underground?” he ponders. “Hours? Half a day? How come our bodies don’t show any effects of being burned by the digestive fluids? We were covered in hydrochloric acid. Yet look at our skin. Nothing.” Mulder acts as if this would be unusual on television. Television doesn’t cast people who look like David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson so it can cover them in acid scars. Tellingly, none of those suspiciously absent acid scars turn up in Biogenesis either.

Field Trip is very much about trapping Mulder and Scully in an hour of television, and allowing awareness of that decision to brush up against them. However, it is telling precisely what kind of hour of television inside which Mulder and Scully find themselves trapped. The hallucinations in Field Trip are not mundane or generic; they are very specific. Although they only last a little over ten minutes each, the separate hallucinations for Mulder and Scully are essentially conclusions for the show. They wrap up the show in a definitive manner, providing closure for the leads.

At this point, it seemed like the only way to end The X-Files might be as a hallucination. The show certainly wasn’t going to get a chance to end for real any time soon. One of the more interesting aspects of Field Trip is the way that it proposes that it might be impossible to satisfy both Mulder and Scully with the same ending. The episode seems to suggest that any ending of the show would have to favour one of the characters over the other. An ending true to Mulder would perhaps be a disservice to Scully, and vice versa.

So Field Trip offers two very different endings. As with Bad Blood, these character-specific sequences are wonderfully illuminating. Field Trip classifies Mulder as relentlessly optimistic. Wallace and Angela Schiff are not dead, despite the fact that the authorities recovered their bodies. Even that little detail reveals a wonderful understanding of Mulder’s personality. For all that Mulder projects an image of detached cynicism, he dreams of a world where it is possible to save everyone; even those already dead.

Interestingly, Field Trip foreshadows a surprising amount of Mulder’s character arc in the seventh season. In The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati, Mulder would dream about living in a world where all of the people who died in his quest were restored to life. Similarly, Field Trip seems to nod towards Mulder’s abduction in Requiem. As the bright white light floods the cave, Wallace and Angela retreat. Mulder stands his ground. “They’ll take you too!” Wallace shoots, right before Mulder begins walking into the light.

Given that David Duchovny had yet to announce his definite plans to depart at the end of the seventh season, it seems unlikely that Field Trip was written to foreshadow an episode more than a full season away. Instead, the decision to conclude Mulder’s character arc with his abduction in both Field Trip and Requiem points to just how logical that story beat as an endpoint for the character. Of course Mulder wants to be taken. That was arguably suggested by his willingness to go along with Fowley in One Son.

Field Trip suggests that the logical end point of Mulder’s quest is simple: Mulder gets to save everyone, to experience abduction first-hand, and to bring proof to the masses. “I was out there… and I found it,” Mulder tells Scully, proudly. “The truth.” This is the really the ideal point at which The X-Files could conclude for Mulder. The only missing detail is an admission from Scully that he was right and that she was wrong. After all, how could Mulder hope to convince the entire world if he could not convince his partner?

“I can hear him,” Scully admits on encountering the grey alien tucked away inside Mulder’s bedroom, which sounds like the world’s worst euphemism. “I… I don’t know what to say, Mulder. Where to begin. I mean, you… you were right. All these years, you were right.” It is a moment that Mulder has undoubtedly wanted for years, an admission from Scully that he was always right and that she has come to accept that. “Mulder, I’m admitting that I was wrong.” It is a massive moment.

It is also the moment at which the fantasy breaks. Mulder was admittedly skeptical at points in Wallace’s account of events, but Scully’s admission shatters the idea that Mulder has finally found what he is looking for. As much as Mulder wants to be entirely right, there is part of him that accepts he cannot be entirely right. For Mulder to be so entirely and completely right would be a massive disservice to Scully as a character. To give Mulder such a happy and conclusive ending would require completely dismantling Scully’s worldview.

Field Trip seems to suggest that it is impossible to provide both Mulder and Scully with a happy ending at the same time, and that to deny one of the duo a happy ending is to undercut the other. While Mulder might claim that he wants Scully to abandon her skepticism, that would mean giving a huge part of who she is to him. This is particularly true when Field Trip offers a glimpse of Scully’s “happy ending” to her time working on The X-Files, with the episode suggesting that the only way that could happen would be over Mulder’s dead body.

Tellingly, the episode offers us a glimpse at Mulder’s “happy ending” first. Indeed, by the time that we join Scully, the script has quite clearly tipped its hand and clued the audience into exactly what is happening. This is a very shrewd decision, if only because Mulder’s fantasy fits a lot more comfortably with the aesthetic and outlook of the show. Sure, there are incongruous elements and inconsistencies, but the general bias toward Mulder makes it easier to accept the fantasy for longer. It would be possible to end the show in something approaching this manner.

In contrast, Scully’s fantasy is pretty much relegated to a grim alternate universe. The world of The X-Files is so heavily stacked against Scully that the only way she could get the last world would be if Mulder were dead. Field Trip offers Scully up a vision of a world where she gets to be right, where the explanation for those mysterious bones is logical and rational. It is a world where there are no digestive juices on the skeletons to muddy the water, and where Skinner signs off on her conclusions without any hesitation.

Scully’s fantasy is presented as rather depressing. It is a world without mystery or magic, without any “extreme possibilities” to brighten up the day. Field Trip implies that The X-Files is so deeply rooted in Mulder’s world view that it would become an entirely different television show if Scully were right. It is a world that feels mundane and lifeless, rote and routine. All of the excitement and energy has just been sucked out of it. It is no coincidence that a world where Scully is right is centred around a wake or a funeral.

A world where a giant man-eating fungus has been replaced by “a double murder, possibly one with ritualistic overtones” is a more boring world. Field Trip suggests that there is a romance to Mulder’s worldview. Mulder’s fantasy is presented as hopeful and optimistic, while Scully’s is funereal and pessimistic. Mulder and Scully might face horrific crimes and cases, but those cases suggest that they inhabit a universe of almost infinite possibilities that is removed from more human horrors.

The short appearance from the Lone Gunmen is a nice touch. Vince Gilligan’s script for Unusual Suspects positioned the trio as idealistic outsiders chasing a paranoid fantasy as a way of avoiding the pain of the real world. Field Trip suggests that stripping those conspiracy trappings away turns these three charming well-intentioned losers into grim would-be vigilantes. Frohike vows, “We’ll find him. We’ll find him, and we’ll make him pay.” All of the joy and fun is lost. The X-Files is no longer a story about a world where anything can happen.

However, while Mulder’s fantasy is optimistic and Scully’s fantasy is pessimistic, Field Trip does declare one to be right and one to be wrong. Mulder’s fantasy is much more in line with the tone and mood of The X-Files, but that just serves to trap him for longer. For all that Scully is stubbornly skeptical, she sees through her own fantasy a lot quicker than Mulder sees through his own. Field Trip suggests that the only way for Mulder and Scully to continue is to reconcile their perspectives – to move past their own fantasies and engage with one another.

Discussing the development of the episode in The End and the Beginning, Frank Spotnitz makes a comparison between Field Trip and Bad Blood:

As I remember it, it went through a lot of permutations. Originally, it was about Mulder trapped in a cave with a monster. Then both Mulder and Scully were trapped underground. Then it turned into Mulder and Scully thinking the other one was trapped underground, with only Mulder gradually realizing what was really happening. And then suddenly everyone became very excited. Because we’d never really done an X-File like this. We could explore Mulder’s and Scully’s differences by seeing the extremes of their two hallucinations – a serious version of what we did comically last season in Bad Blood.

Spotnitz is quite right here, but Field Trip does more than simply emulate elements of Bad Blood. In fact, Field Trip seems to reconcile the core ideas of Vince Gilligan’s scripts for Bad Blood and Folie á Deux.

Sitting in the middle of the fifth season, Bad Blood had suggested that Mulder and Scully had differences in perspective that were practically irreconcilable. Right before the end of the same season, Folie á Deux suggested that those differences in perspective were not as irreconcilable as they might initially appear. Field Trip seems to complete that miniature character arc by suggesting that Mulder and Scully have gradually learned to see the world from each other’s perspective.

Mulder and Scully both figure out that they are trapped inside a fantasy by embracing the other’s perspective. Struggling to determine the nature of his fantasy, Mulder casts himself as a skeptic. “Two skeletons we found were identified as yours and Angie’s,” Mulder tells Wallace. “I don’t understand that. It doesn’t make sense to me.” When Wallace hits on some Mulder buzzwords (“cattle mutilations”, “the truth”), Mulder refuses to be distracted. “I had that thought but there’s no precedent for it. It’s in none of the literature.”

When Scully accepts his theories, Mulder offers dialogue that could have come from Scully herself. “That doesn’t sound like you, Scully,” he states. “God, I can’t believe you’re buying this.” Scully has a similar reaction in her own fantasy world. “What the hell is wrong with everybody?” Scully demands at Mulder’s wake. “You guys, there are unanswered questions here! Am I the only one that’s asking them?” She continues, “You should be all over this, not buying the party line. Look, something else is going on here. Am I the only one who thinks that?”

Bad Blood suggested that Mulder and Scully were really just archetypes – believer and skeptic. In contrast, Field Trip suggests that both characters have come a long way in the six years from The Pilot. Mulder is more willing to examine and interrogate his beliefs than he ever was before; Scully is willing to accept the possibility of irrational and seemingly impossible phenomena. Mulder and Scully might appear to occupy opposite positions – and their dynamic may play into that appearance – but they are more than just cardboard cutouts.

As with Vince Gilligan and John Shiban’s script for Monday, there is a curious sense of optimism underpinning this existential crisis. Monday suggested that there was still room for growth and development between various iterations of the same day, even with the characters trapped in an unending loop. Field Trip suggests that Mulder and Scully might not be ready for the end of The X-Files, but that does not mean that they haven’t grown and evolved over the past six years of the show. Field Trip is a curiously optimistic take on some core sixth season themes.

Speaking of those sixth season themes, Field Trip even features Wallace and Angela Schiff as a romantic couple who stand in for Mulder and Scully. It reinforces the romantic theme running through the sixth season, the sense that Mulder and Scully might be partners in more than just a professional capacity. The sixth season has repeatedly hinted at the idea of Mulder and Scully as a romantic couple, juxtaposing them against romantic couples in How the Ghosts Stole Christmas and The Rain King and teasing pseudo-romance in Triangle, Dreamland and Arcadia.

Even the casting of Wallace and Angela references Mulder and Scully. Wallace is tall and dark-haired, while Angela is shorter with red hair. “You had a fine time tromping around and leaving me a half a mile behind,” Angela complains in the opening conversation, suggesting that she understands how Scully can feel. “Look, for future reference, me running through the woods after you for an entire day is not my idea of a good time.” Wallace replies, “I’m sorry. I’ve got longer legs.” The script is ambiguous as to whether he ever told Angela to “get those little legs moving.”

These comparisons are reinforced during Mulder’s fantasy, when he discover Wallace hiding alone in the cave. Wallace is undergoing his own version of the character arc that Mulder experienced during Duane Barry, Ascension and One Breath. “Angela, she’s still up there… being experimented on and I can’t… I don’t know what to… what do I do?!” Wallace laments. Mulder grappled with the same sense of helplessness. When Angela is returned, she is returned like Scully; she has a chip in the back of her neck.

Vince Gilligan and John Shiban’s script for Field Trip is very clever. The script cleverly sets up all of its revelations, but even the use of repeated words and phrases from the first act helps to lend an uncanny feel to the adventure. It is clear that the fantasies drawing from the recent memories of Mulder and Scully, so all those repeated phrases and ideas make a great deal of sense. It is a very clever and very effective way of lending an ethereal feel to the episode even before Mulder starts seeing green gunk everywhere.

The plot for Field Trip seems to have been inspired by the real-life discovery of a 2,384-acre fungus found in the Blue Mountains of Oregon during 1998, displacing the previous record-holding 1,500-acre fungus found in Washington in 1992. Field Trip acknowledges this quite heavily. “Biologists have found specimens that range dozens of acres that weigh hundreds of tons,” Scully tells Mulder. The decision to shift the action from the Blue Mountains of Oregon to the Brown Mountains of North Carolina is a particularly nice piece of wordplay.

Interestingly, the discovery of these gigantic fungal organisms and their claim to be the largest living organisms on Earth sparked debate about what actually constitutes a single organism:

Ironically, the discovery of such huge fungi specimens rekindled the debate of what constitutes an individual organism. “It’s one set of genetically identical cells that are in communication with one another that have a sort of common purpose or at least can coordinate themselves to do something,” Volk explains.

Both the giant blue whale and the humongous fungus fit comfortably within this definition. So does the 6,615-ton (six-million-kilogram) colony of a male quaking aspen tree and his clones that covers 107 acres (43 hectares) of a Utah mountainside.

Even the use of the fungus ties into the themes of Field Trip. If the fungus can claim to be a single living organism, then perhaps the same can be said of Mulder and Scully? Perhaps the two characters are not so different.

It is through the fungus that Mulder and Scully come to share the same hallucination, and it is through that hallucination (and their understanding of one another) that they confront the unreality of their situation. Mulder and Scully may not be identical, but they are two individuals “in communication with one another that have a sort of common purpose or at least can coordinate themselves to do something.” They confront the situation together, and the closing shot of the episode is of the two characters hold hands as they are driven to hospital.

If Bad Blood was about how Mulder and Scully had two very different and irreconcilable perspectives, then Field Trip offers a convincing counter-argument. The duo have learned to see the world through each others’ eyes in the year-and-a-half since Bad Blood, and that this represents a very clear and meaningful growth. Field trip suggests that any version of The X-Files that were to focus exclusively on either Mulder or Scully’s perspective would mean the end of the show, and that it is the contrast (and the understanding) between the two that keeps the show young.

As with Folie á Deux at the end of the fifth season, Field Trip feels like the perfect closing monster of the week story for the sixth season. It offers a nice cap to a year that has been fascinated by the relationship between Mulder and Scully and with the existential challenges posed by the success of The X-Files.

Filed under: The X-Files | Tagged: believer, ending, field trip, fungus, hallucination, john shiban, mulder, sceptic, scully, skeptic, the x-files, vince gilligan, x-files |